Short Summary

Italy's week-old Centre Coalition Government on Tuesday (4 July) faced Parliament for the first time to present its policy programme and set in motion a confidence debate which will be its first trial of strength.

Description

Italy's week-old Centre Coalition Government on Tuesday (4 July) faced Parliament for the first time to present its policy programme and set in motion a confidence debate which will be its first trial of strength.

In a 12-thousand word policy speech to the Chamber of Deputies, the country's new Prime Minister, Signor Giulio Andreotti, proposed a wide-ranging reform programme and measures to revive Italy's stagnant economy and curb crime and violence.

Law and order was an issue common to nearly all the parties in the recent general elections. But Andreotti's plans to revive the economy will include some form of confrontation with the unions, and stiff resistance to this proposal is expected from the opposition Socialist and Communist Parties.

This opposition is in turn linked to the law and order platform. Newspaper workers, university teachers and agricultural labourers are already agitating, and much more unrest is Peared in the autumn when labour contracts for over four million workers--a quarter of the total labour force--come up for renewal.

The government of Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, and Liberals, which is also supported from outside by the Republican Party, was formed on June 26th after a five-month political crisis.

The Coalition therefore excludes the Socialists from power for the first time in ten years and replaces them with the right-of-centre Liberals, making it Italy's most conservative administration for more than a decade.